Premier Zhu Rongji has long been the West's favourite economic reformer within the Chinese leadership, as well as the most powerful.

World leaders feel at ease with Mr Zhu

Foreign leaders viewed him as a safe pair of hands, steering China through Asia's financial meltdown in the late 1990s and into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last year.

Now he is preparing to retire, officially at least.

The 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is set next week to reshuffle its top bodies, promoting people picked in secretive internal power struggles over recent months.

Chosen successor

Mr Zhu will then remain as Premier until China's "rubber stamp" parliament meets next March.

Next week's Congress is expected to put the seal of approval on his struggle to clinch trusted deputy Wen Jiabao as his successor.

How successful has Mr Zhu been as top steward of China's booming but unbalanced economy?

There is no doubt he has been hugely influential.

'Respected'

Western political and business leaders found him
reassuring and credit him with clinching China's market-opening World Trade Organisation (WTO) deal, which has brought foreign capital pouring into the country.

"He was a very impressive individual from the very beginning...a man of enormous curiosity," says Dr Nick Lardy, a China specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who first met Mr Zhu in the mid-1980s as mayor of Shanghai.

Big city stores sell glamorous lifestyles

He is probably the most respected Chinese leader at home too; though CCP leaders do not need to win multi-party elections, achieving legitimacy does matter and his departure could leave a gap.

"He's someone who is well respected by Chinese citizens," says Angie Eagan, manager of US marketing firm Burson-Marsteller's Shanghai office.

"Having somebody who can hold the respect of multiple generations is quite something."

China is outstripping the rest of the world on growth rates and foreign investment and is taking a bigger chunk of global trade.

It notched up economic growth of 7.9% in the first nine months of 2002, according to official figures, and looks sure to beat the government's 7% target for the year while most major economies are in the low single digits.

Mr Zhu kept things on track in the difficult years of the late 1990s, so that China averaged growth of 9.7% a year over the two decades to 2000.

While global trade stagnates - it is likely to grow by 1% this year - China's trade soared by 18% in the first nine months of 2002, with exports outstripping imports, says Dr Lardy.

China is pumping goods into the world market. It now makes half the world's cameras, a third of air conditioners and about a quarter of all washing machines and fridges, according to weekly economic digest, the Far Eastern Economic Review.